Your summer reading list on juries need never run low. If it does, run a quick search on SSRN for the word "jury." Just in the last month, scholars have posted the following:
1. On statistical fallacies: "Statistics in the Jury Box: How Jurors Respond to Mitochondial DNA Probabilities," David H. Kaye , Valerie P. Hans , B. Michael Dann , Erin Farley and Stephanie Albertson, from the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. From the abstract:
[W]e examine how jurors who responded to summonses for jury duty evaluated portions of videotaped testimony involving probabilities and statistics. Although some jurors showed susceptibility to classic fallacies in interpreting conditional probabilities, the jurors as a whole were not overwhelmed by a 99.98% exclusion probability that the prosecution presented. Cognitive errors favoring the defense were more prevalent than ones favoring the prosecution.
2. On jury nullification: "Necessity and Jury Nullification," Travis Hreno, from the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence. From the abstract:
[T]he most striking thing about jury nullification is that nothing is done to actually prevent or punish jurors who behave this way. In this paper, I explore three rationales for why jury nullification is an officially tolerated, if not necessarily welcome, element of Anglo-American criminal law jury trials.
3. On how long deliberations take, a topic on which I get waves of searches whenever a high-profile jury is out for awhile: "Time to Deliberate: Factors Influencing the Duration of Jury Deliberation," Thomas L. Brunell. From the abstract:
The empirical results indicate that 6 person juries are no quicker than 12 person juries; as cases become more complex and/or more severe, juries deliberate longer; non-unanimous decisions take longer to reach than unanimous ones; panels that saw many potential jurors excused during voir dire end up deliberating longer than panels with fewer challenges.
4. On witness confidence and credibility: "Expanding the Scope of Cross Examination so that Jurors Can Infer Witness Calibration," Barbara A. Spellman , Elizabeth R. Tenney and Robert MacCoun. (I wrote about an earlier confidence paper from these authors here.) From the new abstract:
Jurors rely heavily on witnesses' confidence and veracity when evaluating credibility. Three studies demonstrate that jurors will regard a witness's calibration - the relation between that witness's own confidence and accuracy - as more important than either confidence or veracity when calibration information is available. We have already shown (Tenney et al. 2007) that initially jurors prefer a high-confidence witness; however, when an error allows the evaluation of calibration, jurors prefer a low-confidence but well-calibrated witness to a high-confidence poorly-calibrated one.
5. On the demeanor of defendants and others not on the witness stand, a topic we've discussed here: "Courtroom Demeanor: The Theater of the Courtroom," Laurie L. Levenson, forthcoming in Minnesota Law Review. From the abstract:
This article proposes an approach to deal with non-testifying demeanor evidence that occurs outside the witness box. Given the problems with having jurors rely on demeanor evidence, courts should be carefully monitoring the use of non-testifying demeanor evidence. Appropriate jury instructions should be given, including those warning jurors on proper use of such evidence.
6. On choosing jury trials over court trials: "Preferences for Juries Over Judges Across Racial and Ethnic Groups," Mary R Rose , Christopher G. Ellison and Shari Seidman Diamond. (Both this topic and Prof. Diamond's work are frequent topics here.) From the abstract:
We asked a representative sample of 1,465 residents of Texas to state whether they would prefer a jury or a judge to be the decision maker in four hypothetical circumstances. Consistent with expectations, non-Hispanic whites favored juries over judges, particularly if they imagined themselves as a defendant in a criminal trial. By comparison, although African-Americans and some Hispanics generally favored juries, they showed a much weaker set of jury preferences. African Americans had markedly lower support for the civil jury, but support was higher among minorities with prior jury service. Among Hispanics, respondents who took the survey in Spanish typically preferred a judge to make legal decisions. We consider the implications of our findings for trust in the jury system and trust in community members as decision makers.
Don't print them all at once, or the sunscreen won't fit in your beach bag.
(Photo by Thomas Tringale at http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=376900808; license details there.)
